Before I ever publish an article on dotTech, I spend significant time researching the topic which I will post about, finding alternatives, and discovering every kook and niche of it. Being human – yes I am human – by the time I get to the end of my evaluation, I have a tendency to forget some facts I think of at the start of my evaluation. To help combat this forgetfulness I have gotten into the habit of jotting down notes in Notepad during my evaluation so I can refer to them when I actually write the article. The only problem with the Notepad method is I create a new Notepad for every small detail and eventually I have so many Notepad files, I can’t tell which one holds what information. If you are in a predicament like me, i.e. you like to take quick-notes yet have no means of properly organizing them, give CintaNotes a try.

CintaNotes is a lightweight and user-friendly notes manager:

^[1]

With CintaNotes, users have the ability to

• Easily create new notes
• Organize notes via tags
• Search notes
• Quickly merge multiple notes
• Grab text (“clip text”) from other sources, such as an internet browser, and automatically insert it into CintaNotes
• Import, export (as .TXT or .XML), and automatically backup notes
• Use hotkeys to clip text, add a new note, and open the main program window.

Best of all CintaNotes supports Unicode and has a very small footprint – taking up only ~500 KB for the portable version and ~1 MB for the installer version and uses about only ~3 MB of RAM while running (RAM and hard drive space usage minimally increase as more notes are added obviously).

The bad part about CintaNotes is it is not very “featured” filled; all the features CintaNotes has I already mentioned. In CintaNotes’ defense, it is designed to be small and user-friendly instead of having many features. However, there are two features I would definitely like to see added into CintaNotes:

• The ability to password protection CintaNotes. If the developer added encryption features that is even better but I would like to at least have the ability to password protect CintaNotes to prevent wandering eyes from looking at my notes.
• The ability to insert images in notes.

Here is a short demo video on CintaNotes, to show instead of tell:

NOTE: The demo video is interactive. In other words, you have to click on the arrows to progress it from section to section – it won’t play automatically.

Demo video on CintaNotes by xbeta ^[2].

You can download CintaNotes from the following links:

Version reviewed: Beta M10.5

Supported OS: Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/Win7.

CintaNotes homepage ^[3]

[Direct download - installer ^[4]]

[Direct download - portable version ^[5]]